Demand Fuels China's Solar IPOs

If anyone was wishing for Chinese solar-panel companies for Christmas, boy were they not disappointed.

Trina Solar was one of two China-based solar-panel companies that squeaked into the public markets before the gates closed for the year.

Like the other, Solarfun Power Holdings (SOLF), Trina hit the U.S. markets only a few short weeks after the initial prospectus was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, an accelerated schedule that normally takes a few months.

Trina filed on Dec. 6 and was priced on Dec. 18. That left institutional investors with less than two weeks to appraise a foreign-based start-up -- a risky move, in that buyers could shy away unless they had time to digest the new offering.

In Trina's case, it didn't make much difference. The offering was oversubscribed.

Last month, Trina's stock was priced at $18.50 per American depositary share, above the anticipated range of $15.30 to $15.50. On its first day of trading, Dec. 19, the ADS, equal to 100 common shares, moved even higher. It debuted at $26 and then popped up as high as $26.75 before dropping back to about $20 a share at the end of the day.

Things have been relatively stable since then, as Trina's shares hovered around their offering price, an apparently tacit market consensus that the offering price, although raised at the last minute, is an appropriate value for the stock while the company proves itself.